Software Development, Technology and Innovation

Web 2.0 Second Wave

Note: This blog is a stream of though produced while I was waiting for a bus. Supporting links for my poorly crafted arguments will be added later.A lot of people are suggesting that the Web 2.0 bubble is going to burst, others are even suggesting that it already has, its just that we haven’t noticed yet.Personally I think we are looking at some good old fashioned rationalisation – after all, how many social video sharing sites do you need? Listen – it is going to play out like this, there are going to be some high profile buy outs (Google/YouTube) followed by some starvation. Other video sites will survive, especially those with a strong financial backing and which form part of a larger Internet-enabled strategy (MSN Soapbox).The effect of this rationalisation (and it will happen across all of the application types) is that more funding will become available for the second wave of Web 2.0 sites/services (please don’t call it Web 3.0). The second wave of sites/services will be more focused on solving discrete business or personal problems rather than providing infrastructure services and this will create an eco-system where the successful second wave sites consume the services of the infrastructure sites (photos, video, etc) rather than rolling their own. It’s all about leverage.Infrastructure sites will continue to evolve if they want a slice of the action. You can’t continue to be advertising funded whenyou are consumed as an API by another commercial system (mashup) so there needs to be some kind of micropayments solution.Of course we have numerous examples of these second wave sites and services already but I suspect a few of them are in commercialisation limbo because they don’t know how their backend infrastructure providers are going to charge them.=

2 thoughts on “Web 2.0 Second Wave”

The same thing was said at the height of the .dot com boom. But it hasn’t happened yet. In order to get critical mass a micropayment system has to have global reach, and content that people are willing to pay for. The problem at the moment is not only the former (although the payment heavyweights such as VISA might be able to push things through) but that why pay for something on the web when you can get it for free elsewhere. News sites tried charging, but people just went elsewhere.

The only way payments on the web will work is if a global system of paying for content was implemneted. Every web site that served content would be paid for each MB, and everyone who received would pay for each MB. The difference in the two rates would cover infrastructure costs.